For no other reason than joy

An exhibition of new work by Dundee-based artist Saoirse Amira Anis, entitled For no other reason than joy, which opened on 9 July 2022.

Saoirse Amira Anis’s practice spans moving image, installation, sculpture and performance, and she is interested in materials, memories, and movement, and the value of empathy and care. Her work explores personal therapeutic processes and how these relate to the ways we share our vulnerabilities with each other, and it is informed by radical community-based approaches to governance and care that run through queer Black feminist thought. 

Increasingly, Saoirse is drawing upon her Scottish-Moroccan heritage, which includes ancestry from Mali and Mauritania. In her recent work, she has combined dance, heritage and nature, and over 2020-21, Saoirse began to elaborate an alter ego called Freedom Princess, initially as a source of ‘internal conflict resolution’, exploring elements of costume and movement in the natural landscape. She has said:  ‘Her name derives from my own – Saoirse Amira translates from Gaelic and Arabic to Freedom Princess. This alter ego is a way for me to explore the world through the eyes of a person who is not shackled by any earthly requirements or confusions.’

For no other reason than joy is the first occasion that Saoirse will give physical form to Freedomia, Freedom Princess’s world, as a place unburdened of the weight of human history, free of violence, guilt or shame: ’It has no links to capitalism or state-fuelled inequality; no bloody history of slavery or terror.’ Instead, it is a place that combines the celestial and the informal, levity and immanence: ‘Freedom Princess doesn’t come from anywhere you’d be able to identify on a map, so don’t ask…’

Saoirse will share a new film work commissioned for the exhibition, A Lesson in Frivolity, which she shot in locations in Nithsdale in Dumfriesshire, and near to Collecchia, in Molise, Italy, whilst she was attending the residency programme established there by the Museum of Loss and Renewal.  The film will be installed in our upstairs space amidst a backdrop of yellows, purples and golds and alongside sculptural and textile elements that combine natural, earthy materials with those that are gaudy and extravagant: ‘I hope the space will feel a little like the visitors are entering into another world – a small insight into Freedomia. Though the inspiration behind the work is extremely personal and fraught with tension, I hope that the end result is joyous, vibrant and a little magical.’